


A poisonous thought

by Ely_Pines



Series: The Ultimate Voltron S8 AU [5]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Day 5, Gen, Pidge has PTSD, Pidge is hurt, Whumptober 2018
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-22
Updated: 2018-10-22
Packaged: 2019-08-05 21:15:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16375136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ely_Pines/pseuds/Ely_Pines
Summary: You can't fall from the sky and then hope everything'll be ok.





	A poisonous thought

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt day 5: Poisoned

The screen wall was quietly displaying the news at a low volume - it was almost a murmur. Pidge was staring at it blankly, her mug in her hand, neither drinking nor truly paying attention to the T.V. The nice-dressed lady was eager to remember to her viewers how well did the rescue mission go. Indeed, it started as a tragedy - the Puigian ship couldn’t slow down and was most definitively going to crash on Earth - but had the ending of a happy fairytale - the Black Paladin unexpectedly appeared and saved the day!

“Bullshit” whispered Pidge out of sudden.

She put down her mug and seized the remote. She turned off the T.V. and rose up after taking back the cup. She went behind the countertop and drank the rest of her tea - blurgh, cold - before putting the mug into the sink. She went to exit the common room when she nearly bumped into Lance.

“Hey Pidge!” he chimed to her, cheerfully.

“Hi, Lance” she replied in a growl without turning to look at him.

She didn’t bother to make sure he wasn’t offended, though she did feel like he was going to say something. But she hurried up and headed to her room where she let herself fall flat on her bed. For several minutes, she lay there, just staring at the ceiling.

 

It had been three days since the rescue. And despite whatever “happy ending” the news was showing, it didn’t turned out fine. Not for Keith, at least. Anyone could have asked him about the details if only he had woken up yet. Well, Keith wasn’t really in a coma - he would opened his eyes sometimes, eat a little, and then pass out again - but it had been three fucking days and none of them, none of the doctors, were even sure he would eventually make it.

Not to mention his arms that he probably wouldn’t be able to use like before ever again.

If the Castle of Lions were still around, they simply would have put him in a healing pod and wait till he’d been done. (Coran and Pidge’s father were actually working on a healing pod but Bob’s knew how long it would take them or if it would even work.)

However, Keith’s condition wasn’t the reason of Pidge’s gloomy attitude for the past few days. Keith’s auto-declared (and yet successfully achieved) mission had raised a topic in everyone’s head, here, at the hospital: the possibility of going back in the field. As proven by the disaster that followed said rescue mission, the Paladins were well aware that they were still healing from their big fall and thus Voltron going back into business was out of the question. What wasn’t, however, was the training.

Pidge had heard Lance talking about it with Hunk and, a day later, with Allura. It wasn’t a big deal; the Cuban boy only thought about taking off, doing a backflip or two and going back to the base. Hunk seemed unsure about the idea - Pidge saw him wincing every time Lance mentioned the subject - maybe because what happened to Keith (and the fact that he was sleeping when it happened) had scarred him off. Allura however seemed to look keenly at Lance’s idea.

“The danger has yet to be gone for the Earth” she said when the four Paladins happened to be in the Cafet’ at the same time. “The Galra may return sooner than we’d expect it so we must be ready for it.”

 

Strangely, Lance never asked Pidge what _she_  thought about the whole idea.

Maybe he had understood how she felt. Or maybe not. Maybe there was something wrong between them.

 

So, here they were, on the plain afternoon, standing next to their Lions, waiting for the doctors to finish preparing them up. Their vitals were going to be carefully watched over and they had to wear a new suit, one that had been created for the sole purpose of their training: it was tighter than the usual ones, especially around the arms and the legs. Nobody wanted to repeat Keith’s tragedy. Finally, they got to climb into their Lion. When she was about to enter Blue, Allura turned to look up at the platform where Pidge was standing, leaning on the railing.

“You sure you don’t want to come?” the princess asked her.

Pidge shook her head. Allura looked disappointed for a second and then she disappeared inside the mechanical beast. Soon, they took off. Pidge watched them for a moment before eventually heading back to her bedroom, walking up the corridor that had been built specially to connect the Lions’ hangar with the hospital.

She curled up on her bed and cried. The others surely thought she was afraid of getting hurt but they were wrong. If anything, Pidge was certainly the most healed one amongst the Paladins - and thus least likely one to get hurt because of the flight. The problem was elsewhere.

The problem was she didn’t want to go back inside Green.

She didn’t want to fly inside her _ever again_.

 

It was literally poisoning her existence. She knew she’d have to face it sooner or later - later being the worst time of course. Heck, if the team was already back in training, “later” would not even be that late. But she just. Couldn’t.

Pidge didn’t even knew her fear of flying again was so huge until she saw Keith flying at a insane speed just to be able to catch up with the alien ship’s own high speed. She had managed to remain cool while she explained the manoeuvre as he was processing it but later, when Keith had had the ship safely landed - right before passing out himself - she noticed how her hands were shaking.

The girl had nightmares waking her up nearly every night - every one on the team had them. Sometimes, these nightmares revolved around losing her family. She would see Matt’s grave and think she had imagined the whole “his wrong birthday date is a clue to his current location” thing. Others times, she would revisit the day she had learned her father and her brother had gone missing. These were bad dreams but once she was up, she knew they weren’t the reality. In reality, both her father and Matt were safe and alive and reunited with her and her mother. The worst nightmares happened every week - at least - and had her waking up sweating and panting.

In those nightmares, she dreamed about her fall.

 

They didn’t even had the time to think it through. The giant purple robot was going to explode and take the Earth with it. With ATLAS down, they were the only ones left to prevent it from happening. And there was also only one solution: take it to space and hope they’d go far enough. It was a one-way trip. How could it not have been? But because they were the Paladins of Voltron, they didn’t even hesitate. They did it. And Pidge saw the robot exploding with merely a bitter feeling in her guts.

When the blast hit them, it mostly knocked them down, along with their Lions. Pidge re-emerged later when he and her Lion entered the atmosphere and the air pressure made everything trembling. She clutched her levers and try to have Green running again. But Green wouldn’t wake up. The girl watched themselves falling. Though she hadn’t been scared when they took the robot into space, she was now completely terrified. Because she was powerless. Because the clouds were vanishing and she could see the ground. Because Green wouldn’t slow down. Because no one else responded through the intercoms. Because she shook her levers in vain. Because she knew the impact would kill her. And above all, she knew _how_.

Because she hadn’t been lucky enough to fall with only the sky to look to. Because she thus was able to count the seconds before the impact. Three, two, one...

She woke up. She remembered it was only a dream.

Yet, that wasn’t fully true: it had happened. She may have learned her father and Matt’s disappearance through the news on the T.V. but she went into space and brought them back. She may have stood in front of Matt’s grave but the wrong birthday date had led her to him.

However, she had fallen from the sky. And no one had come to save her.

 

The sun was slowly disappearing beneath the horizon. The team was probably gathering in the common room for tonight’s diner. Pidge rubbed nervously the sleeves of her suit. She knew that if she pressed her fingers in some areas around her arm, she could feel the metal rods that had been attached to her bones. The suit’s fabric seemed pretty thick, though: she couldn’t feel them anymore. Also, she hadn’t heard the three Paladins complaining after their flight, earlier on the day, so she guessed the suit worked well enough.

The Green Paladin took a deep breath.

“Okay, girl, we can do it.”

Her Lion had her mouth wide open and her giant eyes seemed to stare directly at hers. Pidge climbed up the footbridge slowly, almost reluctantly. When she entered the cockpit, her heart started to beat faster. She sat down and places her shaking hands on the two levers. She swallowed and closes her eyes briefly.

Green lighted up.

“Good girl” Pidge said but her voice sounded hoarse and she felt like throwing up.

She decided to wait a few more minutes, at least until she’d stopped feeling nauseous. She looked at her surroundings to pass the time. Everything felt so familiar. In a way, more familiar than anywhere she could have lived in recently. The view, the chair, the control panels; it just felt right. And at the same time, so frightening. Pidge was stressed out. She knew she was about to panic.

She breathed.

She could do it, though.

She could draw the levers to her, shut Green’s entry way, have her roar and burst into the air. She could do it, she could tighten her grip on the controls and just do the usual stuff, so easy, so simple. She could do it.

 

She couldn’t.


End file.
